Crematorium for Phoenixes by Nikola Yanchovichin Read Free Book Online Page B

voice
that came through the wall of pain that brick by brick, grief by
grief, mud by mud, had created a swampy castle from which there was
no escape.
    “Then what’s stopping you from believing
me?” asked Takeshi.
    “As you have already answered: ‘me.’ It is
terrible when a person loses the meaning of his life, but the real
fear is to not be himself at all,” Akuma said. “Don’t think that
you are the first that has promised to help us. We have met many
such as you. There were those who had strayed from the stormy North
Aleutian islands. They came as shamans. And there were priests of
the desert steppes of Mongolia, and also the Brahmins from the
Malabar Coast in the far south of India.
    “We are tired of waiting to meet our God,
and there is nothing worse than a tired soul, my friend. It hopes
only to sleep the eternal sleep so that it may sink into
nothingness forever.”
    “Then each person, be he good or bad, is the
answer to the prayers of someone else. Maybe I’m the one for you. I
need people who have almost broken all their ties to life to agree
to go with me,” said Takeshi.
    “I told you that . . .” Akuma said.
    “You need a little proof to believe me. I
know this, and so I will show you,” Takeshi finished, and rolled up
the sleeves on his right hand which he began to shake to show that
it was broken.
    Above the wrist was an expanse of unhealthy
skin; it was dried out, as wrinkled as a winter apple, and
completed with boils and spots.
    The man focused and the sick places seemed
to come alive. His skin swelled, moved, and become red. It enlarged
by a few inches and it was clear that his muscles were throbbing
and trembling. A surprised cry could be heard, and all of the men
turned to Akuma, who stirred his hand.
    He was perfectly healthy.
    The sick ones collapsed on the floor,
worshiping the miracle. They wept like helpless children or losers
whose dreams had come true.
    “Who are you?” Akuma shakily asked with his
throat released from the stranglehold of pain.
    “They call me Takeshi in Japan,” he
repeated. His eyes were narrowed into slits and hazy, signs of the
control it took him to command the pain.
    He wiped his face with trembling limbs,
caught in a Parkinson rhythm. He did so slowly and said again, “I
am here because I need you . . . .” There was a long pause. “I need
you, but not all of you.”
    It was as if a stone had fallen with a thud
into stagnant water.
    “You said that you were going to cure us!
And now you are saying that you won’t heal everybody?” asked the
patients with a naïveté that young children use in those interviews
that open their eyes to the evil in the world surrounding them.
    “I cannot. Otherwise I will die.”
    “But you have healed Akuma!” they insisted,
again with that childlike innocence that the mud of the everyday
throws over the idyllic.
    “Yes. But you have seen what happens
after.”
    There are times, reader, in which life is
nothing but a station that people arrive at. Some get on the
vehicle and others get off. They are separated and collected, taken
in one direction or another. At this moment, there are no special
words that can be used, no words of the kind that are spoken in the
great volumes of literature.
    But separation and distance, like the
layered, broken faces of mirrors, remained.
    “Then you’ll go without me.”
    “Without me.”
    “Without me, too.”
    The lepers, one by one, like a disheartened
army without a cause, dispersed and moved again to their beds. They
were quickly rendered as nothing more than shadows chased away from
the sun.
    Takeshi stayed with Akuma.
    “You think it’s easy? To play God? If only
you knew . . .” he shouted.
    “Knew what?” Akuma asked, standing as the
only tree that had weathered the storm.
    “How difficult it is to have the power to
help, but before you to have the whole world and the grief that
exists within it. To face the choices from which there is no
correct path. I